My post regarding the varying potency of mushrooms from the same patch at different times of the season still poses the same question: Should these be regarded as different "strains" then? And also, the same species picked at the same time in the season, but from different patches (miles apart) that are exposed to different environments (say a similar substrate in an area where different trees are growing [eg: pines vs eucalyptus] or at a lower altitude located next to a natural water source), will also produce fruits of differing strengths. Should they be classed as a different strain?
Obviously, the mycelia at the start of the season have been collecting the nutrients during the non-fruiting period and for this reason, the mushrooms produced are more potent than those that grow in a third or forth flush. This is also true of the mycelia of the same species that grow in different patches but vary in potency. One network thrives due to better environmental factors, while the other doesn't produce fruits of the same strength for a variety of environmental reasons.
One patch produces fruits that are more potent than another due to environmental factors. Isn't that the same as isolating the best mycelia and allowing them to thrive in a controlled environment? I don't see how this is a different "strain".
Oh, well that's a slightly different discussion. That's another interesting topic that raises (perhaps somewhat profound) questions that seem to imply much more: where we have historically drawn lines, are there really differences? I think Linnaeus would be pissed off about people doubting how real such distinctions really are, after all they were meant to be practical handles to at least make some sense of things and categorizing even when you could admit it is arbitrary. Our culture and science are both full of dogma. The world is not black and white, the vast majority of things come in shades...
So about mushroom patches and strains and substrains: you could say that whenever you can find enough difference between two specimens you could classify them differently based on that. And if you look close enough, you will see that each individual is unique. If only for the fact that every place in space and time is unique as long as you have the tools to measure the variation with enough accuracy. But at small enough scales we do encounter some organisms or parts of organisms that try their best to duplicate. But the forces of entropy are always mixing shit up. Tiny errors and mutations may or may not prove significant enough to mushroom (no pun intended?) to serious proportions. If the mutations stays an infinitesimal fraction, is the result a clone?
It always depends on your standards and thresholds. If you keep focusing on some fundamental truth that nothing is really the same, then you are in danger of getting little work done.
But the conclusion would be that there is no right or wrong when it comes to determining things like mushroom species, only preset rules. Rules often chosen carefully to serve to make distinctions between properties that are either too obvious to ignore or too important in consequence like whether a mushroom is known to contain a poison or not. Sure, it could be that some biologists go nuts and eccentrically try to name some organism after themselves because of a minute detail. There is probably a committee that judges whether a new species is allowed to be put on record, but they are also only human... each member also being a unique subsubsubsubspecies.
It has been said before: A lot of Cubensis substrain classification stems (
) from a motive rather irrelevant to biology namely marketing. Even if part of it can be excused by the argument that they are separately classified because of where they are found.
Still something should be remembered: when a strain of single genetic origin is spread over different places with varying environmental factors, then over time you can expect the strain to adapt to this in certain ways. Evolution and adaptation are inextricably intertwined. So even if you take such a so-called substrain out of it's typical environment it can have a tendency to grow a certain way. Maybe some grow larger because they can afford to draw up that much water. Perhaps in the jungle they have to be fast colonizers to at least get a share of the pie at all. But if your growing conditions at home are very different from those ideal for the substrain, you will see the consequences of that, and it is likely to become hard to really see what part of how the mushrooms grow is because of their genetic heritage and what part is environmental.
I think this logically means that if you grow different sorts of Cubensis substrains under the exact same conditions you can expect them to look more alike than you had expected, because the environmental factors normalize the outcome.
The rattlesnake venom you mentioned is indeed a different kettle of fish - I can see how that would be classified as a different strain, as fundamentally, it's a hybrid of two species.
All of my knowledge is based upon picking in the wild, so this growing indoors is new to me, but I've thought about getting a box going for fun over summer (in OZ), and this thread piqued my interest.
Edit: Can you send me a link to where you read about the use of rattlesnake venom? That sounds fascinating.
Sure here is a link and a quote, you can find more yourself but searching the Shroomery for 'snake venom' and 'hybridization'.
Certainly this is not exclusive to the species of mushrooms in this document, some strains of cubensis have been said to be created this way (Redboy maybe?) and there is also a story about a really special type of Cubensis-Azurescens hybrid, which most mycologists seem to find a hoax because they are too similar and it would be impossible to pull it off. I think it's PESA and you should probably consider it a marketing ploy, but if they are telling the truth, something like venom is probably how it was done.
http://www.nwbotanicals.org/nwb/lexicon/hybridcordyceps.htm
HYBRIDIZATION:
Once we had developed the substrate and growth parameters to optimize the target compounds, we started looking into the chemical profile differences from different strains of Cordyceps sinensis. Since there were so many strains of Cordyceps, and each strain has its own unique chemical profile, we tested all of the strains we were able to obtain. None of the known strains was shown to produce nearly the quantities of active ingredients found in the wild Cordyceps. So we started experimenting with ways to quantitatively increase the target compound production through the hybridization of Cordyceps strains; to cross breed them in order to gain greater production of target compounds. This was quite a challenge. Since spore collection and separation is very time consuming and results in entirely too much unknown variations, we felt this method would take too much time before we had reliable results. Rather we took a novel approach. We experimented with various ways to get different strains of the fungi to perform their own nuclear fusion. There are several chemicals known to trigger this exchange of genetic material between unlike cells. Nicotinic acid for instance, can be used to create hybridized mycelium. This compound is difficult to use and yields unreliable results. After trying several different compounds to trigger this fusion, what we settled on was snake venom. See Illustration 1
Illustration 1 – Collecting snake venom
SNAKE VENOM AS A HYBRIDIZATION AGENT:
We used purified snake venom from the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox see illustration 2) [Sigma Scientific, St Louis Missouri, USA] for our hybridization techniques. The snake venom is added to the agar medium in quantities that alters the growth but does not prove toxic to the strain in question. This range of snake venom is from 10 mg to 30 mg per 300 ml of agar medium. The venom is not heat stable and must be added aseptically after sterilization of the medium. The agar used for this hybridization is an Aloha Medicinals Inc. proprietary agar named R7 Agar, consisting of malt extract, activated carbon, minerals and humus – the carbon-rich ash residue from a coal burning industrial process. For the exact recipe see table 4. Other agars could probably be used as well. This just happens to be our production agar that we use everyday, and once we found that it also worked with the snake venom for hybridization, we found no reason to experiment with any other agar.
